Holding Space

Elisa Halliley. -COURTESY PHOTO They call it music therapy, which is too imprecise a term to describe what really happens sometimes when the rubber meets the road — when music touches a person sliding into eternity through a gradually darkening tunnel called dementia. What happens, says a 15-year veteran of such work, is “holding space.” Those are the words Elisa Halliley uses to describe her human and humane insistence, with music, that life can be rich even in singularly diminished periods. Halliley is a music therapist not only by education and training — she earned both an undergraduate and a master’s degree from Florida State University — but by calling and profession. She’s director of Integrated Services at MorseLife in West Palm Beach, an all-in-one facility for those 55 and older. They offer independent living, assisted living, memory care, skilled rehabilitation — and for the last eight years a Hospice program, she says. Integrated therapy includes art and massage therapy amo